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hand. He had put his hand up to stop the blast of a shotgun. Larry Bilello, the old guy who was the cook at the pizzeria and did twenty-five years for a cop killing, yelled at me to close the door. I did. I already knew that Paulie didn't want anybody dying in the place. Instead of letting him in, I grabbed one of the chairs and took it out on the street so he could sit down and wait for the ambulance. I took off my apron and wrapped it around his hand to stop the blood. The guy was bleeding so bad that my apron was soaked with blood in a few seconds. I went inside and got some more aprons. By the time the ambulance came the guy was practically dead. When the excitement died down Larry Bilello was really pissed. He said I was a jerk. I was stupid. He said I wasted eight aprons on the guy and I remember feeling bad. I remember feeling that maybe he was right. "About this time a guy from the South opened a cabstand around the corner, on Glenmore Avenue. He called it the Rebel Cab Company. The guy was a real hick. He was from Alabama or Tennessee. He had been in the army, and just because he'd married a local girl, he thought all he had to do was open his place and compete with Tuddy. He lowered his prices. He worked around the clock. He set up special discounts to take people from the last subway and bus stops on Liberty Avenue to the far reaches of Howard Beach and the Rockaways. He either didn't know how things worked or he was dumb. Tuddy had sent people to talk to the guy. They said he was stubborn. Tuddy went to talk to him. Tuddy told him that there wasn't enough business for two companies. There probably was, but by now Tuddy just didn't want the guy around. Finally one day after Tuddy has been banging things around the cabstand all day long, he tells me to meet him at the cabstand after midnight. I couldn't believe it. I was really excited. For the whole day I couldn't think of anything else. I knew he had something planned for the Rebel cabstand, but I didn't know what it was. "When I got to the cabstand Tuddy was waiting for me. He had a five-gallon drum of gasoline in the back of his car. We drove around the neighborhood for a while until the lights were out in the offices of the Rebel Cab Company, on Glenmore Avenue. Then Tuddy gave me a hammer with a rag wrapped around its head. He nodded toward the curb. I walked up to the first of the Rebel cabs, squeezed my eyes, and swung. Glass flew all over me. I went to the next cab and did it again. Meanwhile Tuddy was wrinkling newspapers and pouring gasoline all over them. He'd soak the papers and shove them through the windows I had just smashed. "As soon as he finished, Tuddy took the empty can and started hopping like mad up the block. You'd never know Tuddy lost a leg, except when he had to run. He said it was dumb for both of us to be standing in the middle of the street with an empty gasoline can when the fires began. He gave me a fistful of matches and told me to wait until he signaled from the corner. When he finally waved, I lit the first match. Then I set the whole matchbook on fire, just like I'd been taught. I quickly threw it through the broken cab window in case the gas fumes flashed back. I went to the second cab and lit another matchbook, and then I did the third and then the fourth. It was while I was next to the fourth cab that I felt the first explosion. I could feel the heat and one explosion after another, except by then I was running so fast I never had a chance to look back. At the corner I could see Tuddy. He was reflected in the orange flames. He was waving the empty gasoline can like a track coach, as though I needed anyone to tell me to hurry." Henry was sixteen years old when he was arrested for the first time. He and Paul's son Lenny, who was fifteen, had been given a Texaco credit card by Tuddy and told to go to the gas station on Pennsylvania Avenue and Linden Boulevard to buy a couple of snow tires for Tuddy's wife's car. "Tuddy didn't even check to see if the card was stolen. He just gave me the card and sent us to the gas station, where we were known. If I'd known it was a stolen card I still could have scored. If I'd known the card was hot I would have given it to the guy in the gas station and said, 'Here, get yourself the fifty-dollar reward for returning it and give me half of it.' Even if it was bad I would have earned on the card, except Tuddy wouldn't have had any tires. "Instead, Lenny and I drive over to the place and buy the tires. The guy had to put them on the rims, so we paid for them on the card and drove around for about an hour. When we got back the cops were there. They were hiding around on the side. I walk in the place and two detectives jump out and say that I'm under arrest. Lenny took off. They cuffed me and took me to the Liberty Avenue station.
"In the precinct they shoved me in the pens, and I was playing the wiseguy. 'I'll be out in an hour,' I'm telling the cops. 'I didn't do nothing.' Real George Raft. Tuddy and Lenny had always told me never to talk to the cops. Never tell them anything. At one point one of the cops said he wanted me to sign something. He had to be nuts. 'I'm not signing anything,' I tell him. Tuddy and Lenny said all I had to give them was my name, and at first they didn't believe my name was Henry Hill. I took a smack from one of the cops just because he wouldn't believe a kid running around with the people I was running with could have a name like Hill. "In less than an hour Louis Delenhauser showed up at the precinct. 'Cop-out Louie,' the lawyer. Lenny had run back to the cabstand and said I had been pinched on the credit card. That's when they sent Louie. They took care of everything. After the precinct the cops took me down for the arraignment, and when the judge set five hundred dollars bail, the money was put right up and I was free. When I turned around to walk out of the court I could see all of the Varios were standing in the back of the room. Paulie wasn't there because he was serving thirty days on a contempt hearing. But everybody else was smiling and laughing and started hugging me and kissing me and banging me on the back. It was like a graduation. Tuddy kept yelling, 'You broke your cherry! You broke your cherry!' It was a big deal. After we left the court Lenny and Big Lenny and Tuddy took me to Vincent's Clam Bar in Little Italy for scungilli and wine. They made it like a party. Then, when we got back to the cabstand, everybody was waiting for me and we partied some more. "Two months later Cop-out Louie copped me out to an 'attempted' petty larceny and I got a sixmonth suspended sentence. Maybe I could have done better. Looking back, it sure was a dumb way to start a yellow sheet, but in those days it was no big thing having a suspended sentence on your record. And I felt so grateful they paid the lawyer, so that my mother and father didn't ever have to find out. "But by now I'm getting nervous. My father is getting worse and worse. I had found a gun in his basement and had taken it across the street to show Tuddy, and then I put it back. A couple of times Tuddy said he wanted to borrow the gun for some friends of his. I didn't want to lend it, but I didn't want to say no to Tuddy. In the end I started to lend Tuddy the gun and get it back after a day or two. Then I'd wrap the gun up just exactly how I found it and put it back on the top shelf behind the pipes in the cellar. One day I went to get the gun for Tuddy, and I saw that it was missing. I knew that my father knew what I was doing. He didn't say anything, but I knew he knew. It was like waiting for the electric chair. "I was almost seventeen. I went to the recruitment office and tried to sign up. I thought that was a good way of getting my father off my back and keeping Tuddy and Paul from thinking I was mad at them. The guys at the recruitment office said I had to wait until I was seventeen and then my parents or guardian could sign me up. I went home and told my father I wanted to enlist in the paratroopers. I told him he had to sign me in. He started to smile, and he called my mother and the whole family. My mother was nervous, but my father was really happy. That afternoon I went to the DeKalb Avenue recruitment office and signed up. The next day I went to the cabstand and told Tuddy what I'd done. He thought I was crazy. He said he was going to get Paul. Now Paulie shows up, very concerned. He sits me down alone. He looks me in the eye and asks me was there anything wrong, was there anything I wasn't telling him. 'No,' I said. 'Are you sure?' he asked. 'Yeah,' I said. Then he got very quiet. We're in the back room of the cabstand surrounded by wiseguys. He's got two carloads of shooters on the street. The place is as safe as a tomb and he's whispering. He says if I want to get out of it, he can fix it with the recruitment office. He can buy me back the papers. " 'No, thanks,' I said. 'I might as well do the time.'"
Page 2 and 3: WISE GUY LIFE IN A MAFIA FAMILY by
Page 4 and 5: =ONE= HENRY HILL WAS INTRODUCED to
Page 6 and 7: He never had a telephone. He hated
Page 8 and 9: much he yelled at me, no matter how
Page 10 and 11: out for cops, especially the plainc
Page 14 and 15: =THREE= WHEN HENRY HILL WAS BORN on
Page 16 and 17: In Brownsville-East New York wisegu
Page 18 and 19: things, so everybody showed up. He
Page 20 and 21: ich businessmen and union guys, mos
Page 22 and 23: limit' master. He'd do a day at a s
Page 24 and 25: of them--needed help here and there
Page 26 and 27: money involved that some guys--thos
Page 28 and 29: Henry stood me up. I had dinner wit
Page 30 and 31: move. Fucks. I swear I would have s
Page 32 and 33: And as they talked I began to look
Page 34 and 35: there wasn't enough room in the tru
Page 36 and 37: KAREN: Some of the marriages were w
Page 38 and 39: who were in prison with him at the
Page 40 and 41: new office in a trailer on Flatland
Page 42 and 43: continued the men on probation. He
Page 44 and 45: Just the sight of it drove me nuts.
Page 46 and 47: there to straighten it out. He said
Page 48 and 49: "But usually we didn't have to do a
Page 50 and 51: got to the place and went to her ro
Page 52 and 53: atted people out years ago, and he
Page 54 and 55: "It turned out that Paulie and Phyl
Page 56 and 57: =ELEVEN= IN 1969, at the age of twe
Page 58 and 59: LINDA: I first met Henry when Peter
Page 60 and 61: * * * HENRY: That night I got home
Page 62 and 63:
HENRY: After Karen made me take Lin
Page 64 and 65:
"I could see that all of these peop
Page 66 and 67:
also deduct 2 or 3 days a month fro
Page 68 and 69:
with the parole board. Even so, the
Page 70 and 71:
joint. Bill sold about a pound of p
Page 72 and 73:
Still, they knew their father was d
Page 74 and 75:
next best thing to being home. It w
Page 76 and 77:
=FIFTEEN= HENRY HILL WALKED OUT of
Page 78 and 79:
"They knew who I was and why I was
Page 80 and 81:
=SIXTEEN= HENRY WAS OUT OF PRISON o
Page 82 and 83:
knew about the alarm. Whalen's hand
Page 84 and 85:
sudden move that he almost broke my
Page 86 and 87:
three grand to go Christmas shoppin
Page 88 and 89:
clock surveillance of Jimmy Burke,
Page 90 and 91:
do with the robbery. He claimed he
Page 92 and 93:
of Schenectady Avenue and Avenue M,
Page 94 and 95:
usiness. Judy was going to hang aro
Page 96 and 97:
Mann remembers looking at the kid a
Page 98 and 99:
incriminating arrival and departure
Page 100 and 101:
Robin's kitchen utensils were cover
Page 102 and 103:
MCDONALD: Henry Hill's arrest was t
Page 104 and 105:
I yelled. I kept yelling they'd hav
Page 106 and 107:
Instead, I showed up at Jimmy's swe
Page 108 and 109:
After a couple of weeks I went back
Page 110 and 111:
he realized Henry would testify aga
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